Joe (Cage) is a hitman livin' that hitman life - no connections, erase all traces of your passing, kill who you get paid to kill and don't worry about the morality of it. Deciding it's time to get out of the game, he books a gig in Bangkok - four separate hits for a crime syndicate - and when he gets there, recruits a young street hustler named Kong (Yamnarm) to be his errand boy and translator, fully intending to kill him when all is said and done.
Things don't quite go that way; Kong winds up getting into Joe's heart a little when he shows more loyalty and gumption than Joe expected, and Joe winds up falling for a deaf pharmacy...employee (I have no idea whether she's actually meant to be a pharmacist or just a clerk), Fon (Cheung). He mentors Kong in self-defense (maybe with an eye towards training him to be an assassin, but it never gets that far), and continues doing the jobs he's there for. And that's fine, because his targets are, as Kong points out, bad men.
But then Joe is out with Fon and gets jumped by a couple of muggers, and he quickly kills them both, and Fon panics and runs away (I mean, obviously). Joe becomes despondent and goes back to doing his job, but chokes at the last minute because the fourth hit is on the goddamn Prime Minister (Keang Kunsri, I think), who Kong tells him is a good man. His employer, Surat (Kaljaruek) grabs up Kong and Aom (Hemmanee), Joe's informant and go-between whom Kong has been seeing, and Joe has to do the third act bloody rampage to free them!
So...I actually didn't hate this movie. It's not bad. It's certainly better than the 9% on Rotten Tomatoes it's getting. Sure, it's not really treading any ground that The Mechanic, Leon the Professional, or Grosse Pointe Blank didn't already, but it's very different in tone than any of those, too. What's interesting is that it's a remake of the Pang Brothers' first film (same title), in which Kong was the POV character, was already a hitman, and he was the deaf-mute character (the conceit apparently being that gunshots didn't bother him because he can't hear them). So aspects of the characters get mixed around here, but the broad strokes seem similar. This includes the ending where Joe (Kong in the original) shoots himself in the head, simultaneously killing Surat.
Second act drags a bit, but not painfully so. There are a couple of pretty effective scenes, most especially the one in which Joe mercilessly dispatches the two muggers and Fon stands looking out over the river, oblivious, until blood spatters her jacket. The action isn't anything to write home about, but it's fine. I actually like that while Joe is a competent marksman, he's not super accurate under pressure (he misses a lot during the river chase sequence).
The standout performance is Yamnarm as Kong. Cage is playing Muted Cage (as opposed to Wild Cage), so we don't get much of a range from him, but I do like how he portrays Joe during the scenes where he's trying to get to know Fon and bumping up against the language barrier twice (she understands English, but of course speaks in sign). Kaljaruek's Surat is on the verge of being interesting, and I wish he'd gotten just a little more time to react when Joe threatens his wife to get him to back off.
Overall, though, it's not high art but it's a solid enough action/drama, which is a hell of a lot more than I thought I'd say for it.
My Grade: C+
Rewatch Value: Medium-low
Rewatch Value: Medium-low
Next up: Barbarian
No comments:
Post a Comment